On the accretion history of galaxy clusters: temporal and spatial distribution

Abstract

ABSTRACT We analyse the results of an Eulerian adaptive mesh refinement cosmological simulation in order to quantify the mass growth of galaxy clusters, exploring the differences between dark matter and baryons. We have determined the mass assembly histories (MAHs) of each of the mass components and computed several proxies for the instantaneous mass accretion rate (MAR). The mass growth of both components is clearly dominated by the contribution of major mergers, but high MARs can also occur during smooth accretion periods. We explored the correlations between MARs, merger events, and clusters’ environments, finding the mean densities in 1 ≤ r/R200m ≤ 1.5 to correlate strongly with Γ200m in massive clusters that undergo major mergers through their MAH. From the study of the dark matter velocity profiles, we find a strong anticorrelation between the MAR proxies Γ200m and α200m. Last, we present a novel approach to study the angularly resolved distribution of gas accretion flows in simulations, which allows to extract and interpret the main contributions to the accretion picture and to assess systematic differences between the thermodynamical properties of each of these contributions using multipolar analysis. We have preliminarily applied the method to the best numerically resolved cluster in our simulation. Amongst the most remarkable results, we find that the gas infalling through the cosmic filaments has systematically lower entropy compared to the isotropic component, but we do not find a clear distinction in temperature.